Authors: Steven Levingston
How easy it was to overspend in profligate Paris. The temptations were strewn along the boulevards. Giant display windows beckoned the curious into dreamy department stores
“where one finds practically everything one can desire,” as one awed provincial girl put it. Seductive advertising—women in the latest fashions, heads cocked, smiling beneath their parasols—raised the hopes of the less glamorous, but the dreams came at a cost: You had to empty your pocketbook.
The offices of the Sûreté overflowed with women, some in deep financial straits. But no matter how wretched their penury, they brought a sparkle to the eye of Inspector Jaume, who wrote:
“I myself don’t have any complaints about this extraordinary inquiry: the stairs and corridors have never been more perfumed. In Goron’s office, one thinks oneself in a boudoir. A rustling of silk here, a whisper of gossip there.”
In the first week Goron questioned more than twenty women—all of whom had slept with Gouffé just in the month of July. Nearly two dozen women in a single month, this harem of lovers, each one flouncing in and protesting she was innocent of any wrongdoing. Gouffé was a handsome man, with chestnut-brown hair, fine clothing, and a gentle, attentive manner. In Jaume’s lively imagination, the missing man exuded a magnetic, even heroic, allure. Assessing the bailiff’s sexual prowess, Jaume quipped: “Don’t speak to me of the labors of Hercules. That was just a worn-out horse next to Gouffé.”
By the end of the week, all the comings and goings, all the perfumes and protests in the detectives’ offices had led nowhere. But while he had no suspects Goron had his suspicions. Gouffé’s shady associate Rémy-François Launé was often in and out of his office, drawing up paperwork, stamping it with the bailiff’s personal seal, and he sometimes had in his possession large quantities of money he’d collected from debtors. Goron questioned him hard, suspecting that Launé knew far more about Gouffé’s disappearance than he was divulging, but the Sûreté chief came away with nothing he could pin on him.
Another suspicious figure was Louis-Marie Landry. In the days following the disappearance he had behaved curiously; he’d gone to his brother-in-law’s office and carted off a stack of private letters and destroyed them. Landry, who was about fifty years old, had long graying hair and a mustache and goatee that, according to one description, gave him the
“air of an ancient cavalry officer.” Questioned about the letters, he asserted that they were written to Gouffé by assorted women and contained salacious information; if the details became public, he explained, they would have blackened his brother-in-law’s reputation, harming the family and embarrassing his daughters.
Gouffé had been as industrious in his career as he was in his love life, amassing a tidy fortune that made him an ideal target for robbery or extortion. His lockbox at the Banque Parisienne, detectives discovered, contained a hundred and thirty thousand francs, and at Crédit Lyonnais, he had another two hundred thousand francs. (Three hundred and thirty thousand francs equals about $4.2 million in 2013 dollars.)
After a week of inquiry, Goron still had little to go on: no leads, no suspects, nothing. Just dead ends and wild speculation. Could the missing man have been the one who hanged himself from a tree in the Chevreuse woods? What of that corpse found floating in the Seine? Neither, it turned out, was Gouffé. He had vanished without a trace, and the longer he was gone, the more complicated the hunt became.
Sniffing a sensation, the newspapers flocked to the mystery, and Goron was soon facing tough questions.
“The investigation so far is in vain,”
L’Écho de Paris
sniped. “The agents of the Sûreté are not any further than they were on the first day.”
The Sûreté was the most venerable and successful detective agency in the world. It was older and more sophisticated than its British counterpart, dating back to 1811 when Napoleon’s prefect of police ordered the convict-turned-superlative sleuth Eugène François Vidocq to form a band of four ex-cons like himself to sniff out and pursue criminals; until then, police efforts had been largely directed toward rooting out dangers to the monarchy, not investigating criminal offenses. Vidocq’s detectives knew the underworld and took whatever measures were necessary to haul in evildoers, but their unsavory personal histories and tactics left a taint on the Sûreté for years. By the time of Goron’s arrival, the detective force had moved away from employing ex-cons and was now populated with men who were considered above reproach.
The public—recognizing the Sûreté’s achievements but mistaking the literary world of crime for reality—regularly expected a swift, happy triumph over evil. Paris detectives were shaped in the popular imagination by the widely read novels of Émile Gaboriau, whose sleuths carefully analyzed clues and used reason and modern science to solve their mysteries. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the directors of the Sûreté were themselves devoted to the latest scientific methods, smarter forensics, and a new system created by Alphonse Bertillon for identifying and cataloguing criminals that was the envy of the world. The Bertillon anthropomorphic method of measuring criminals’ body parts even attracted a high-ranking committee of admirers from London to study it and encourage its adoption back home. French newspaper readers had high hopes that the Sûreté would shine its light of reason into the dark corners of Paris and protect them from the malevolent class.
But Chief Goron had been a sleuth long enough to understand the mundane reality of solving crimes. He prized the hard work of shoe leather on the streets and the sleepless pursuit of every shred of information. What led to a villain’s capture was the magic of the most ordinary skills and a smile from lady luck.
Goron was an avid reader of detective stories—Gaboriau, Edgar Allan Poe, and Arthur Conan Doyle, who in 1887 had published his first Sherlock Holmes mystery,
A Study in Scarlet
—and he enjoyed puzzling out those popular tales. But did they bear any similarity to real detective work?
“Like everyone else, I love to follow the twists and turns” of a good fictional mystery, he told the press. “It is a good intellectual sport—like playing chess. But do not imagine for a moment that it has anything at all to do with practical police work. Nothing at all. It is not by such subtle, opium-bred guesswork and fine-drawn deduction that criminals are detected.”
The last person Jean-Baptiste Eyraud wanted to see on his doorstep was his elder brother, Michel. A bitter memory still haunted him from their last encounter some five years earlier, and ever since Jean-Baptiste had kept his distance. All his life, he’d been tyrannized by Michel, and on this summer day in late July the cruelty was to begin again. So Jean-Baptiste was taken aback to find Michel darkening his door with a young female companion.
Michel and Gabrielle had traveled almost two hundred miles dead south from Lyon to Marseille, where Jean-Baptiste ran a café. Eyraud was comfortable in the south. His roots were here: His father was of Catalonian descent, a savvy businessman who, as one description had it,
“could wheel and deal the stones on the street.” He’d built a successful silk business in Saint-Étienne, about forty miles southwest of Lyon, where Michel was born in 1843, and owned a nearby inn. He eventually moved the family to Barcelona, where he established a fabrics business and later bought a vineyard near Narbonne.
Michel had the benefits of a fine education and had inherited his father’s gift of wheeling and dealing—absent the old man’s integrity. His errant ways presented themselves early in life to the dismay of his father, who prevailed upon authorities to lock his son up at age sixteen in a penitentiary in Oullins, just outside of Lyon, for two years. The cause remains a mystery, though the punishment was severe.
Eyraud’s mother recognized that her eldest son, whatever his faults, was craftier and more intelligent than the younger, more loyal Jean-Baptiste.
“Oh, this one here,” she said of Michel, “has a well-organized head. He makes a lot of money. He is much more skilled than his brother.”
Marseille was an old port town full of mystery and surprise,
populated by tough and tanned natives, sailors, Gypsies, and crooks. The wind howled and seagulls squawked overhead. Church bells rang from morning until night. For generations ships from around the world carrying strange souls and exotic things landed here. The dispossessed and the fugitive knew the hidden alleyways; and the dark corners of Marseille kept their secrets safe.
The writer M. F. K. Fisher, who was drawn to the town again and again in the twentieth century, used the French word
insolite
to describe the people and the place. But, she said, it is a word as
“indefinable as Marseille itself.” She referred to the French
Larousse
dictionary for the meaning of
insolite
: “contrary to what is usual and normal.” Then she turned to the
Shorter Oxford Dictionary
and to
Webster’s Third International
and came up with three words to illustrate the term and the locale: apart, unique, unusual. “Marseille lives, with a unique strength that plainly scares less virile breeds,” she wrote. “Its people are proud of being ‘apart.’ ”
It was the kind of place that protected fugitives like Michel and Gabrielle, a hideout where they could contemplate their next move in comfort and security. They made themselves at home with Jean-Baptiste and lived off his sullen hospitality. Tensions lingered between the brothers from an ugly incident in the early 1880s when Jean-Baptiste was awarded the family vineyard in southern France. As the boys’ mother told a newspaper later, Michel was consumed by a
“ferocious jealousy” toward his brother. Although she recognized the intellectual skills of Michel, she had long favored the gentler and slower Jean-Baptiste and believed the brothers’ relationship would survive “provided they didn’t come to kill each other.”
Jean-Baptiste accepted that his brother had the quicker mind and reluctantly turned to him for help when the vineyard was struck by an infestation of phylloxera, pale yellow insects that ate the roots of the vines. Phylloxera was attacking not just the Eyraud vineyards but was spreading to many properties in France, threatening the country’s wine production. Jean-Baptiste’s situation was particularly dire—creditors were hounding him and bankruptcy was imminent if he couldn’t come up with fifteen thousand francs.
Michel’s solution—which had a hidden motive—was for the brothers to visit their wealthy, aging mother in Paris and beg for the needed funds. She was fully aware of the crisis and had already
doled out a considerable sum to battle the infestation, even staying on the property for six months to oversee the effort. But now her health was failing and she was still in mourning for her husband, the family patriarch, who had died three years earlier.
Her sons found her in bed in her apartment at 45, boulevard Saint-Germain. Seeing his mother so frail, Jean-Baptiste could not bring himself to ask for the money. But Michel had no such qualms. His entreaties did not sway the old lady, however, and she denied him repeatedly until his voice rose so loud and his language turned so vile that his mother ordered him to leave the apartment. He refused and drew a revolver from his pocket and pointed it at his mother as she lay in bed.
Staring him down, the tough matron called his bluff. He may have been a bully and a schemer but he wasn’t fool enough to murder his own mother in her bed. Furious, Michel grabbed a photograph of his father from a bedside table and threatened to tear up the cherished memento and toss the pieces out the window. The old woman caved. Her devil of a son had exploited her weak spot: Losing the cherished photo of her husband would have been too much to bear.
She agreed to hand over the funds but only to Jean-Baptiste. Dismissing Michel, she informed Jean-Baptiste of where she kept her valuables and gave him permission to take the necessary titles to family resources that would cover the amount he needed.
Later, in private, Michel wore Jean-Baptiste down, convincing him that converting the titles into cash required considerable paperwork and that it was best if he handled the task himself. After all, he knew the bailiffs and notaries needed to complete the transactions. Promising to take care of everything, Michel left the apartment with the bundle of titles in his arms—and Jean-Baptiste didn’t see his brother again until he appeared on his doorstep demanding hospitality. Nor did he ever see a franc of his mother’s money. The family vineyard declined, went into bankruptcy, and was sold for a pittance.
Eventually Madame Eyraud moved from her Paris apartment into a hospice in the suburbs and from there to a convent in the south near Marseille, where she died in 1888. Jean-Baptiste brought her body back to Paris and buried it next to her husband’s in a crypt in the tony
Père-Lachaise Cemetery. There the elder Eyrauds shared eternity with the remains of luminaries such as Balzac, Molière, and Chopin.
Meanwhile, Michel was growing anxious in Marseille. After imposing himself on his brother for a couple of weeks, he relieved Jean-Baptiste of three hundred francs and left with Gabrielle for Paris. Michel was still obsessed with his hat, so the first stop was to be the scene of their crime. It was a dangerous, even foolhardy venture. What if the police had traced Gouffé to the apartment and had an agent posted inside or others watching it from the street? But it was a gamble the killer was willing to take.
“A point is clarified for me,” Inspector Jaume later confided to his diary. “I understand now why Eyraud went to find his hat at rue Tronson du Coudray. That hat he’d left at the scene of the crime, it could have served as a terrible piece of evidence against him.”
On October 6, 1886, the day Marie-François Goron became the deputy chief of the Sûreté, his boss, Hippolyte Ernest Auguste Taylor, warned him,
“My dear Goron, you will experience some emotions on your debut.”
That night, two murderers, Frey and Rivière, were to be marched from La Roquette Prison to the guillotine just before dawn with the two Sûreté officials in attendance.